To blurb a single…
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[6.71]
Alfred Soto: “I’ve got a BONE to pick!” the star shouts, and over a loping rhythm he sketches one of the best triumphalist analogies in recent memory. For black men everything has changed since 1767, and nothing has changed. Stars at Kendrick Lamar’s level have their own manias. This volatile combination doesn’t snap the clarity of Lamar’s flow, nor do the Michael Jackson callouts and “The Payback” interpolations. He isn’t just sketching analogies — he’s writing an arc of black musical history.
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: Kendrick is exercised — “I got a bone to pick” — and though he’s still mad (“but I ain’t stressin’) he’s rarely sounded this relaxed or this animated. For a rapper who sounds so weighed down by his thoughts, by his seriousness, by his competitive insistence on besting the rst of the field, it’s fun to hear him this playful, bouncing over a beat as worked-up as he is. “King Kunta” is an eager-to-please track, underpinned by a hooky bass line and stuffed with comic-strip sass (“I was gonna kill a couple rappers but they did it to themselves”; “A rapper with a ghost writer — what the fuck happened?”), blaxploitation supporting vocals, running color commentary, and energized MJ interpolations. If he snatched the crown on “Control,” “Kunta” demonstrates how good it is to be the king.
[9]
Micha Cavaseno: Honestly, To Pimp a Butterfly is a massive failure. It isn’t just because of Kendrick himself, who still remains unable to occupy his own rap voice (even here, this is an overly affected bad attempt to synergize Kokane and Coolio, no real displays of personal adjustment) or construct dense narratives like he used to do with ease. So much of the album is bursting with conceptual ambition, but never seems to actually indicate any sort of real theme or content. Broad gesture is one thing, but surely we aren’t willing to settle with “the radicalism of self-love,” the obvious lynchpin of nearly all of rap’s supposed “vapidity” to be the end-all/be-all argument for why this album is so important, are we? But what’s best embodied in “Kunta” as well as the rest of the album is Lamar’s terrible decision to lean on middling “musical” hip-hop figures such as Terrace Martin or Thundercat. Session musicians in the strictest sense, they, like K. Dot, are too precious to follow the rest of Los Angeles into the muck of ratchet’s New West Coast, leaning towards classicism, austerity, and the stiffness of guys who do G-Funk Museum Features. “Kunta” lacks the brashness, the ego-centricism of L.A. rap pioneers before him, the utter need to validate why you have to give a fuck if they live or die while the record spins in the background. Does Kendrick’s version of L.A. truthfully reveal a life you could never hold the responsibility to uphold, or the strength to thrive within? I think not, and sadly I think its possibly because he’s suffering from the worst kind of reward for the continued recognition of his talents: blind loyalty.
[2]
David Sheffieck: The beat’s a weak point, at least until the outro — a recurrent issue for Kendrick post-Section.80 — but his verses are strong and the hook’s stronger, like the hoarse delivery he’s been workshopping since that Imagine Dragons mash-up is finally clicking into place. Kendrick’s a less thrilling artist than he was a few years ago, when anything and everything seemed possible, but if he’s refocused on mainstream success he’s at least brought some of his early fire and ideas along for the ride.
[6]
Josh Langhoff: The yams are from Things Fall Apart, right?
[7]
Anthony Easton: The music runs quick, the vocals run quicker, and it is an anxious record, settling on a kind of black power pride — smarter and more nimble than “Black Skinheads,” and less doctrinaire than Common. The difficulty of post-party politics in a forever racialized america functions as a set of formal gestures and tight writing.
[10]
Thomas Inskeep: The last minute, with its guitar solo and female chorus of “we want the funk!” is obviously a P-Funk homage, which is pretty much always a good thing. But the three minutes that precede it, I just don’t enjoy. I can see the art in Lamar’s art — reading the song’s lyrics and explanations thereof is helpful — but it just kinda sits there for me. And Sounwave and Terrance Martin’s production is just reheated Chronic leftovers.
[4]